Beyond Redemption
by Fierceawakening
Summary: Drift's swords represent his new life with his new faction. When Megatron captures him, the Decepticon warlord decides to teach him a lesson - using his own blades. T for psychological torture and a bit of physical violence. I'm rather mean to Autobots.


Even here, Drift's swords gleamed.

The room was dimly lit, its metal walls pitted with rust. It was also far too wide, considering that Drift was chained to the wall. That didn't bode well - if Drift didn't need the room to move around, that meant someone else eventually would. Someone who had nothing good in mind for him.

But on the far wall, his weapons hung, crossed one over the other in a formal position of display. They'd even been cleaned and polished, as if his captor gave them the respect he no longer gave their wielder. One of the few lights embedded in the walls shone directly on the blades, making them look almost as if they glowed with their own light.

He knew better than to think all this was really about admiring the weapons. He himself had been a Decepticon for a long time, and Decepticons' weapons were built right into their frames. A few carried a sword or hammer or axe for close fighting or emergencies, but those were weapons of necessity. A Decepticon's real weapons could never be laid down or cast aside.

Which was exactly why Drift had chosen these.

He strained to reach them, but his bonds held firm. He snarled. At first he'd hoped his captor was being foolish, so invested in making some grandiose point that he only made it easy for Drift to be dangerous. But he'd been trying everything he could think of, from brute force to tricks of dexterity to hacking, and he could neither break nor unlock the glowing set of chains holding him.

He vented a noisy huff. It probably served him right for hoping that Megatron would make such an obvious mistake. He of all mechs should know better.

Sagging in his bonds, he stared at the blades, brightly lit on the far wall. The only thing he could do now was wait for Megatron, and answers.

###

The warlord didn't look at him at all. He simply turned away and walked over to the wall where Drift's swords hung, regarding them thoughtfully.

"If there's something you want, just come on and tell me what it is," Drift growled, his optics flaring with angry blue light.

What _was _Megatron after? Information, possibly. Drift not only knew all about Megatron's enemies, but knew exactly what sorts of things Decepticons would most want to know.

Then there was the other possibility: that Megatron didn't give a damn about anything Drift knew and just wanted to be fancy about punishing him for switching sides before killing him for it.

But if he wanted to do that, why choose an empty space like this one? Defiant or insubordinate Decepticons were singled out for punishment in full view of the army, so they could all see Megatron's might and remember to fear and respect him. Primus knew they'd all seen their leader tear Starscream half to pieces when he talked back. So why do all of this here when he could be beating an actual traitor in front of everyone? It didn't make any sense.

But Megatron didn't seem interested in enlightening his prisoner. Instead, he reached out to stroke one of the blades, his movements slow and deliberate.

Drift shivered as if that dark hand were running along his own plating, shrinking from the intimacy of that touch.

An Autobot's weapon was for stopping someone who was trying to kill him. Or maybe, if he was the trigger-happy sort, he'd use it to kill someone he expected to try to kill him, before that someone could try anything.

And if he was that sort, maybe he loved his weapon enough to name it. Enough to clean and polish it when it wasn't strictly necessary. Enough to rush to use it, given the faintest pretext. Drift knew more than a few Autobots like that, despite their leader's pacifism.

But a Decepticon's weapon was part of him. And if he loved it enough -

"Don't - touch - those," Drift ground out.

"These are impressive," Megatron said, his back still turned to his prisoner, as he lifted first one sword and then the other off the wall, turning them around in his hands to feel their weight.

"They aren't of Autobot make," he continued, slashing at the air. "Too light for their size, and too well-crafted." He held one up, watching it shimmer in the spotlight. "And they certainly aren't Decepticon."

"What is it you want to know?" Drift snapped, his tanks roiling as he stared at Megatron's dark hands wrapped around the hilts of _his_ blades.

For the first time, Megatron turned to face his prisoner, his crimson optics flaring in distaste. "Breaking so soon, Deadlock? You disappoint me."

"That's not my name." Drift tossed his head, snarling. "And I'm not breaking."

"When you joined my army, I gave you a name," Megatron growled back. "I don't recall ever granting you permission to discard it."

Drift's faceplates twisted into a tight, white smile. So that was how Megatron wanted to play this.

That was fine with him. This game Drift could play, and better than any of the others in his new faction. Autobots didn't play these games. But Drift had been playing them for stellar cycles, and becoming an Autobot didn't make you forget.

He wrenched his optics away from the weapons in Megatron's hands, staring fixedly at the tyrant's sneering face.

"Call me whatever you want, Megatron. I really don't give a damn. But my name is mine. Not yours."

Megatron snarled, his lip plates twitching, his optics twin pinpricks of flame. Drift stared into them, his confidence returning.

Megatron cycled a heavy sigh through his vents, forcing his faceplates to stillness. He twirled the blades in his hands with exaggerated slowness, light dancing off them as they spun. "Is it now?"

Drift clenched his denta so hard he could feel them spitting sparks to keep from looking, but found his optics locked onto them as surely as his targeting computer locked onto an enemy.

"Drift, you call yourself," the tyrant continued. The blades glittered as they spun, bright and hypnotic. "That is no name for a warrior."

Drift stared, his blue optics flickering with hatred, and waited.

"That is a name for someone who hasn't yet found himself." The blades stopped their spinning. "Or for someone who has lost his way."

Panting, the Autobot strained against his bonds. They held. "And Deadlock is a better one? An impasse built out of the dying?"

He lifted his head. "We all lost our way." His hands clenched, empty without his weapons. He cursed. "That's why I left."

"Interesting, then, that you still say 'we.'"

"I don't give a damn what you think." Drift laughed, a hollow chuckle without mirth. "Or Kup or the Autobots, either."

He vented a long sigh of relief. Strange that something should feel good here, but it did, talking like that. He'd spent so long listening to the other Autobots whispering about him when they thought he couldn't hear. Saying nothing he'd done in his time with them could bring back the others that Deadlock had killed. Wondering whether he'd betray them. Asking how long it would be until his taste for destruction reasserted itself, and who exactly would find themselves caught in the crossfire.

Oh, he'd liked some things about them. That one mech he'd saved - Perceptor. Light and small in his hands as he'd leapt from the wreckage of his old commander's ship. Precise and exacting in everything - including in war. A scientist reformatted into a killing machine.

Drift liked the Autobot sniper, and not just because he'd saved him. Perceptor had been remade too, and that meant he almost understood.

But not the rest. Wreckers, they called themselves, like they knew what it meant to be killing machines. Sure, they all liked killing 'Cons.

But they had no idea.

_"_The hell with them and you," Drift said, and laughed again to think that the only place he could say it was here. "I am my own master."

"Are you?" Megatron roared. "Then why is this so easy?"

He turned, not waiting for an answer, and glided through the first few moves of a fighting form, light glinting off Drift's swords as they arced through the air.

Megatron's movements were graceful and precise, and each turn sent a new wave of nausea through Drift's systems.

Then he realized something, something that stilled his roiling tanks.

Megatron was making mistakes.

They would have been imperceptible to anyone but Drift himself. Megatron was a war machine among war machines, and had vorns of experience using weaponry from across the galaxy.

But these swords were not his. They were not built into his systems, charged with energy in response to his mood, his desire, his need. Swiping them through the air was not like swinging his mace, linked to him by his own transformation systems, purple and bright with his own heat.

Anyone who faced him now would probably die. That, Drift could see. But as sure as his movements were, they were unnatural. He was using objects - showing off how he held them and moved them, how effortlessly he could make them do what he willed.

But he was used to weapons he did not have to hold.

"You don't know what you're doing," Drift seethed, his optics flaring azure. "Go ahead and kill me now - I'm not under any illusions you're not gonna do it - but don't make yourself look like a damn fool."

With a bellow of rage, Megatron lunged at his prisoner. Drift pressed out his chest. If he died, so be it. There were worse things than the kind of suicide that proved your enemy had lost control.

And it would spare him the sight of his blades in his adversary's hands. He'd never have to see this again.

And he would die his own mech: neither a slave to the one who'd deceived him, nor a thrall to those who'd offered him redemption. He could be all he was now: grateful to those who'd offered him a second chance, but not their thing, their toy, their dangerous weapon, feared lest it explode in their own faces.

When the sting came, he welcomed it, arching his back and pushing into the flashing metal, his sensor net singing with agony. He cried out, wanting to feel it devour him.

Then - nothing.

His chest burned. He heard his own ragged panting as air cycled through his vents.

His head drooped, and he looked down to see two cuts in the plating of his chest, the paint slashed off and energon beginning to bead up and run, glowing, down his chest.

He raised his head again to see the blades poised close enough to his chest plating to almost touch it. The metal shook, the tyrant's hands trembling with the effort of holding the blades still.

"Kill - me -"

The Decepticon turned, throwing one of the blades down and then the other. They skidded across the floor, underneath the bright light of the spotlight, landing with a forlorn clatter in the center of the room.

"No - !"

Bereft of any other weaponry, Drift turned his head, prepared to slam it hard into any part of Megatron it would reach. But before he could move, a dark hand wrapped tight around his small head and twisted with relentless force. Drift gave a sharp bark of pain and was still, his engines roaring out his rage.

The tyrant's hands moved to his prisoner's arms, their touch suddenly light. Drift thrashed, realizing what those gliding fingers sought. It didn't help. Megatron stopped what he was doing only long enough to stand back and kick his prisoner full force.

Drift was much smaller than Megatron. The impact rattled his chassis and he hung limply from his chains as Megatron stepped closer again.

The hands moved on his arms, fingertips running along a scar in the plating there, crudely welded and badly painted over. How long had it been since he ripped the lasers from their mounts there, welded what metal he could find into the hollow that remained, taken up his swords, and vowed to create a new life?

And now Megatron's fingers danced along the rough seam, sending phantom bursts of pain through the sensor arrays there. It felt strange to feel nothing but pain, no heat rising in the weapons systems that had been mounted there, crackling with eagerness to repay the insult.

"The Deadlock I knew would never have begged for death," Megatron whispered into his prisoner's audio sensor.

"Not begging, you bastard," Drift scowled, wrenching his head away again and staring at the weapons lying on the floor. "Just telling you to hurry it up."

He cycled a heavy pant, hoping it sounded like pain and not panic. The more the other's warm fingers slid along his scars, the emptier he felt.

Empty and cold and full of a rage he'd spent stellar cycles now trying to forget.

"What, no vows of revenge? No promises to tear the head from my body and the spark from my chest for taking your blades away from you? You must really take this Autobot pacifism seriously. The Deadlock I knew liked to kill."

_I can't kill you, _Drift thought, staring at the swords, dark and lifeless on the ground.

"Not a pacifist." His engine roared. "And I like killing just as much as I used to. Just you and your kind who'll find themselves in pieces when I'm done."

Megatron's hand moved to the crisscrossed cuts he'd left in his prisoner's chest plates. "But you didn't say that until I prompted it, Deadlock."

He took a step back, but only far enough that his broad frame, so much larger than Drift's own, filled the Autobot's vision. "Do you know what I think? I think you've forgotten who you are."

He turned away. Drift's audios filled with a sound he'd heard many times, from both sides of the battlefield: that of Decepticon weapons systems energizing. The air smelled of ozone and anticipation.

Then Megatron fired, lighting the room a blazing purple, consuming the metal lying discarded on the floor.

Drift threw back his head, snarled once, and roared, his engine revving in rage. Images flashed before him, tricks of a wayward processor -

- Megatron, his dark fingers caressing his new recruit's chin, possessive and almost tender, as he gave the young mech a new name -

- the warm seething of energy in his arms as he powered up his new lasers -

- his circuitry crackling with heat as a burst of energy lanced forth from him, catching a blue-opticed enemy in the chest -

- the gleam of light on a broad blade as he twisted to evade it, his lasers firing over and over yet failing to hit, as the mech who became his mentor whirled in front of him, finally cleaving one of his lasers in half -

- his own voice, begging to learn to fight that way -

- his amazement at the lightness of the twin blades in his hands -

- an alien face, blue and fleshy, the skin and muscles bunching in rage, the red eyes narrowing, and then the voice, saying "Cybertronians are a plague. Wherever they go, death and destruction follow." -

- the bright yellow of an explosion, its heat searing his back, as he leapt from the wreckage of a Decepticon vessel, an Autobot held tight in his hands -

- a grizzled old mech watching him as he walked away, telling his companion that everyone deserved a second chance -

- and then nothing but searing purple light, engulfing his weapons and melting them to nothing.

###

His optics flickered. It did him little good. The room was now so dark he could barely make out anything at all.

_I'm not dead, _he marveled._ Megatron didn't kill me._

He rose swiftly to his feet, more steadily than he would have expected. Then again, Megatron hadn't beaten him. Whatever sense that made.

_I think you've forgotten who you are._

His hands twitched, and he reached for the swords at his back before the reality hit him: his scabbards were empty, and would be forever.

He bellowed, a wordless cry of agony and loss.

_Cybertronians are a plague. Wherever they go, death and destruction follow._

He'd chuckled at the alien who said it. Answered her questions by saying he was hunting Decepticons, as if he'd finally found a way to be something better than a cancer.

_Kill me._

It was what he deserved. Whether for the Autobots he'd killed before he'd seen the light or for the betrayal of his old leader. He didn't know which any more. His spark wheeled cold and empty, and he knew he didn't give a damn, either.

Drift. Deadlock. Deadlock. Drift. It all meant the same thing. It all came to the same in the end.

_The Deadlock I knew liked to kill._

His arms hurt, the scars there itching like they had when he'd first welded the plating back together.

He wanted to kill. He didn't care who. Autobot. Decepticon. Decepticon. Autobot. He'd tried his hand at being both.

And both had given him nothing.

He screamed again, his hands clenching into claws. He had no weapons.

He laughed, high and wild. The sound of his own laughter chilled him.

It didn't matter. He'd use his bare hands if he had to.

A grin spread over his pale faceplates. Bare hands were fine with him. They would mean he could feel it, digging his fingers under someone's plating and ripping it back, grabbing at cabling and tearing it free, sparking and pouring energon like a baptism, like a promise.

"You're all dead," he growled. "All of you. I don't give a damn whose symbol you wear."

###

The door to the room slid open. Megatron watched the figure walk over to it, its optics flickering as it struggled to get used to the light.

Its fists were clenched and trembling, its lip plates pulled back in a permanent sneer.

Megatron smiled.

The others would wonder why he was letting this one go. The prisoner was nothing if not dangerous.

But if Megatron didn't miss his guess - and he was certain he did not - the thing he watched had become little more than a ravening beast.

A beast that his enemies would mistake for one of their own.

Megatron's optics flared as he watched the figure transform and speed away. It would prove a useful tool indeed.

All he had to do was make sure his own kind stayed well out of its way.


End file.
